As long as there have been video games, there have been ways to cheat in them. They range from harmless codes that change the weather in Red Dead Redemption to serious hacks that make your aim perfect in Counter-strike. There are different layers of the severity as well; while wallhacking will get you a VAC ban on Steam, it’s likely that no one is going to care if you turn on The Sims 3 and give everyone in your town some free Simoleons.

Cheating, for me, all started with the first Pokémon game. It all went downhill from there. In fact, it almost killed gaming for me.

As a younger gamer, I walked across the world armed with my Gameboy–from gym to gym, my Blastoise in tow. I beat almost the entirety of Pokémon Blue without exploiting. I leveled up my army, I babied my Eevee until I was able to get a rare stone and evolve it. I played by Pallet Town’s rules.

Until I caught wind of a rumor, anyway.

Off the coast of Seafoam island, rumor had it that there was an exploit that Nintendo had left in the game. It was an unidentified pokémon, a piece of errant code named MissingNo. Like any gamer, I had to see it for myself to believe it. Once encountering MissingNo and capturing it, I noticed that its presence duplicated the sixth item in my inventory over a hundred times. Of course, after this discovery, it only made sense that I put arguably the most valuable game items in the sixth slot and sought out MissingNo several more times. Initially I had just wanted to prove a rumor, but eventually I ceded to greed. I duplicated rare candies, gold nuggets, and master balls then I used them. My original Blastoise, a respectable self-leveled 70 at the end of the game, became a level so high it didn’t exist in the game. I went back and captured the legendary birds in a single toss of a pokéball. The end result was that instead of experiencing a challenging final fight, I destroyed the Elite Four; knocking out their pokémon in one hit.

(Ed. note: A couple people have said that the Elite Four would have been easily knocked out at 70 anyway. I never fought them normally, since I cheated, so I would not know this. Additionally, the level cap goes beyond 100 if you encounter MissingNo, which is what I was referring to–while it is an artificial cap, that is what I meant by “so high it doesn’t exist in the game.”)

At this point, after beating the game and augmenting every pokémon I had in my possession, the only thing left to do was brag. That’s exactly what my eleven-year-old self did, too. I quickly told my friends, both offline and online, that I had leveled my pokémon for days–and reached the level-cap.

For some reason, I turned the story around. I didn’t know who MissingNo was. I was, rather, a Pokémon master. I’d created an all-star roster by myself. Part of me was ashamed I’d cheated, the other part relished in the power, and neither part wanted to admit my embarrassing secret. I spent weeks dueling my friends, absolutely destroying them with little to no effort. Even if their team was a similar level, mine had been hit with various potions and rare TMs. They stood no chance.

I never got called out, either. But I did have some consequences to deal with. When Pokémon Silver came out, I had to play a ridiculous amount of hours to get my pokémon half as strong as they had been in Blue. Still, no one was the wiser. Cheating had set the bar, and I worked hard to keep it there.

The problem was that once the cheating bug gets you, it can take a while to shake. It can become an easy solution to when a game gets boring or too hard. Without realizing it, you sort of become a magnet for exploits and underhanded adventures. What started innocuously with the hunt for MissingNo consumed my early gaming years. After Pokémon came The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.

OoT didn’t have any cheats per se, but it had tons of rumors. There were an amazing amount of creative speculations released daily for Ocarina of Time by fans. They were posted on fansites and message boards all over the internet. Unsurprisingly, they spread like wildfire. Each one was different yet somehow unique, giving it an air of authenticity until proven otherwise. They told me that you could unfreeze Zora’s Domain, uncover the Triforce, and even steal Ganondorf’s horse if you just did the right actions. Most of them involved complex routines and series of events to obtain; things like “beating the game without dying” or “hitting every Gossip Stone with your sword twice” were common core conditions.

In case you haven’t caught where this is going–yes, you’re reading the words of probably one of the only people in the world who actually beat The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time with only three heart containers and without dying. It was all for the glory, for the supposed immortality it would reward; in reality, this noble quest took almost half a year to master and dozens of replays.

And, as a side note, you should also know that you are reading the words of probably the only person in the world who lost that immortality on one of the final bosses, Bongo Bongo in the Shadow Temple, and had to start all over again.

I can admit that I’ve cheated in games when I was young and hated struggling in certain areas of a game, but I can honestly say that I’ve never cheated online.
I get the whole “godlike” thing where you want to pwn everyone, but the feeling is more satisfying with glorified justice if you can beat and pwn ppl fair and square. It also then proves that you are in fact a formidable enemy, and ppl will think twice to take you on :P

Love the write-up. So much truth in there. I was actually introduced to hex editing by my dad when I was 12 or so.

Some old game back in the early 90′s had a high score list that also stated what finally killed you. I started it up one day and my name was there, and evidently I had been killed by a “Giant Chicken.” Once Dad showed me what he did, I immediately went to SimCity (a game I had abandoned because it was too slow paced for me) and gave myself millions. I just wanted to design and build, not play the actual game, and the hex editor opened up this entirely new way to play.

Many games worth of cheating later, I was in the DAoC beta and all but done with EQ. Only there for the friends I had made. Suddenly it hit me when I saw yet another message from the server “Character Saved” It happened immediately after I dropped an item to the ground. Hmmmm… I tried this with money, and… no saved character! Instinctively I know that this was ripe to exploit. I knew I would be caught, but I was ready to quit anyway, and combined with ebay, this could make real world money.

Now I just needed to figure out how to revert my character back to its last ‘Character Save’ status. Asking a few good friends, among other things, dieing beyond a zone line did that evidently.

So now I was set, just needed a friend who did not mind chancing his account being banned. After that we started.

Right about this time, a couple new servers opened up (PVP race wars servers – think Horde vs Alliance in WoW, but 4 of them), so by doing this I was able to beat the gold sellers on ebay to the market on a server that was about to be inundated by new players.

Level 1 alt drops some gold, shoots a guard at max range and tries to retreat through to the next zone. Getting killed on the other side of the zone (but before i successfully teleport to the next zone) means I get reverted back to before I had dropped the gold. Now my 1 plat is both on the ground, and in my inventory. Now I drop 2 plat, then 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, etc. Pretty soon my friend needs to run the plat back to the bank because in EQ money had weight.

Start selling groups of 250 plat on ebay for cheap on a server that is only days old. Because this was the early days of MMO’s I don’t think SoE had the tools to really figure out how I was cheating. So it took them over a month to finally get banned. By that time, my 19/20 year old self had enough money to put a huge down payment on a 93 RX7 R1 (twin turbo sports car that was $50k when it was new).

Damn, that sure brings back memories. Tomb Raider 2… what a disaster. That game seemed to be designed for hardcore platformers from the get go. I knew around 8 people who owned it, and out of them, only 2 of them had ever managed to get out of the starting pit of the first level. None of them ever managed to finish Venice, resorting to the skip level cheat like everyone else. No great loss really. The shipwreck levels…. ye gods.

I did my fair share of cheating in the past, mainly because I’ve always been more interested in the story then in the games themselves. Starcraft, Tomb Raiders, Doom… they always reached a point where I thought “Screw this, I just want to see what happens in the end/see the pretty cutscenes”. Since completing the story was more important to me then beating the levels, I rarely had any regrets heh.

You know, I know I must have cheated in a game before. Probably similar to your Pokemon exploits. Maybe I’ve blocked it from my memory cause cheating ruined my experience.

It’s funny, as I read about your Animal Crossing exploit, I was thinking it seemed awesome. Games like that are so slow-paced that it can be frustrating. Interesting to read about how speeding it up eventually led you to get bored with it. It makes me wonder, though, how long it would take to get bored *without* the cheat. Would you have stopped after the same amount of progress either way, even if one route took you longer to get there?

Same thing happened with me and blue, people earnestly warned me it would corrupt my save and I proceeded to having a 5 mewtwo2mew army @ level 255 (the max).

I maphacked for SC, Diablo 2 and briefly found dark amusement in Counterstrike before nodding off. I ran an exploit forum during highschool, it’s a dark road to win by any means. I’m already exploiting in in SC2, google “destromath bottomless” – I’m famous on my old WoW server for going god mode and killing hundreds in Ironforge before crashing the server.

Oh, man. Time traveling in Animal Crossing. I’d put in these mail-in codes for an item that sold for tons of money, time travel to receive it in the mail, sell it, and time travel back. Once I made my house as big as it got, the game felt pointless. ;_; and it was so cute.

Cheaters online piss me off an incredible amount. Sometimes I just don’t understand it, like the modded weapons in Borderlands (which I think they got rid of with a patch or something, I’m not sure). Once I was playing co-op with a few people online and a random person joined our party. He entered our game and proceeded to drop everything in his inventory, all modded weapons, blue, purple, orange, and pearl. It was easy to duplicate them as you just had to drop a weapon so another player could pick it up and then exit to your dashboard so the game wouldn’t save without the item in your inventory. So basically, this person just bestowed “gifts” upon us, and my friends started to pick items up and look at how they were modded. There was a version of The Clipper that could one-shot anything. I was just so confused; why would anyone want these weapons? How easy do you want to make the game? And, again, about a week after this happened, I lost interest in the game. Everyone I encountered was using modded weapons.

And the cheating in Modern Warfare 2… ugh. It makes games completely unbearable. I never play anymore. Sigh.

I have an interesting take on the whole cheating thing… I have “cheated” old games (with walk through guides) I could never play as a kid (grew up poor) as a way to experience the whole story, like watching a movie. Spending 20 hours beating an old 8bit game is not with in my time budget, but still “experiencing” the game with a walk though guide can be fun too. Anyone with me on this?

I can relate to your story. I used to play all the Quake and Doom games on GodMode. Never online though. I don’t like multiplayer. Too stressful.

Anyway, these days I cheat selectively. I’ll get trainers from CheatHappens. Because the thing is – while cheating might take you out of a game, I find that constantly dying and having to reload a save takes me out of the game MORE. I find many games simply too difficult, even on Easy mode. I know that a lot of gamers would tell me just to not play, but I enjoy games immensely, even if I’m not that good at them. I often feel like someone who is passionate about music, even though I can’t play a single instrument.

One of the things I miss the most about cheats, however, is how few of them there are these days. It used to be all the Rockstar games came with absolutely Ridonkulous cheats, that let you turn their sandbox into insanity. They still have them, but they seem much tamer. Just Cause 2 could have used some cheats. That’s a game where the enemies just came crazy swarming at you, and there was never enough ammo, and that ruined my enjoyment of it. A simple cheat that would have let me save my progress but turned off achievements would have been very welcome. I would probably still be playing it now if it had that.

Cheats are an interesting thing. It really is like you say, skipping to the ending of a book. Sometimes it saves time, but diminishes your enjoyment. It’s a fine balance.

One last thing – I played the last Call of Duty with a trainer on. I still hid behind walls, tried to evade fire, ran whenever I got shot – even though I knew I would never die. It’s pretend. It’s like when you’re a kid and your friend shoots you, and you know by all rights you should be dead, but you keep playing anyway, just for fun. In many ways cheats have enhanced my joy of games, rather than taken then away from me. But I know what you mean. I am playing through Dragon Age origins with a trainer on in the background, but not activated. It’s there in case. But it brings me great comfort to know it’s there – to know that I won’t ever get stuck on a section or level.

It was a bit difficult to beat. The controls were kinda stiff and lara would have a hell of a time trying to turn and run. But in the end, just plug away at this game long enough and you will beat it eventually. Totally worth the satisfaction once you finally beat it. Venice is totally the best level in the game, too. followed closely by off shore rig!

Damn good article, though. I lol’d at recalling the inability to level skip past the shark level. I still remember the level’s name: Forty Fathoms. You don’t forget a level like that. Not only could you not skip it, it was nigh impossible.

I’ve never forgiven myself for watching my older brother beat some of the most challenging puzzles in Myst and Riven. Ever since then I’ve been very stubborn about looking up help, especially if it’s a game I really love.

By the same token, I’ve occasionally gotten stuck at points which turned out to be glitches. Half-Life 2 had a door that was supposed to open, but didn’t and I spent the better part of an hour trying to figure out what I was doing wrong. Then again, I looked up a sensible solution in Metroid Prime 3 because I thought it was a glitch (coulda sworn I’d tried everything). In many ways the internet has ruined this sense of mystique. It’s also saved me a lot of time.

I will never forget the first time I played Warcraft II. Starting from one peasant I had built this little winter town, trained a dozen more peasants, had all of five or six footmen deployed around the perimeter. I was feeling pretty good about my valiant little human outpost in the wilds.

And then the AI stormed in with a dozen orc grunts and killed everyone in half a minute. I was eight or nine years old and completely traumatized. I wouldn’t play War2 (or any other single player game) without cheat codes, if I could help it, for years and years after.

Something funny happened after blasting through Starcraft on god mode though… I began to wonder what the actual game was like. It turns out that I found the Starcraft campaign a lot of fun, and not actually that hard. I can’t remember if I made it all the way through Warcraft II again without the cheats, but I remember giving it a shot.

These days I mostly play games the hard way, cheats and exploits are reserved for games that whose difficulty gets in the way of the fun or progression. (I’m looking at you, Final Fantasy Tactics level grind. Duped Excaliburs for everyone!)

So here’s an alternative use for cheating in games: easing in new players who would give up on the game after early defeats. But make sure they eventually play the real game too.

Boo!! Final Fantasy Tactics is such an awesome game. and my lord is it gratifying to finally beat the last boss battle after 20 tries with different classes, weapons and skills each time trying to find that perfect opposition to the absurd force you were up against.

i have a friend who cheated and cheated on every pc game he had. there would be one level that would frustrate him and he would unlock god mode and then finish the whole game as invincible.

but then came xbox live and cheats disabled achievements, which he wanted to show how good he was. but years of cheating had left him a slow bullet sponge in multiplayer matches and unable to finish games on normal, let alone veteran.

“…you’re reading the words of probably one of the only people in the world who actually beat The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time with only three heart containers and without dying.”

You’re twice the gamer I am, good sir.

Also, you totally reminded me that I had some weird dream about being in a virtual reality Pokemon MMORPG last night. I discovered that Blastoise was extremely overpowered and crushed everything in my path. Good dream.

I’ve migrated to Linux and the gaming is somewhat limited, although it’s improving. What’s most notable for me is that many Linux games actually demand newer hardware (I’m cheap and run the lowest specs possible). A good mmorpg is Regnum, but I can’t play it on my laptop. Some other FPS also don’t play on my laptop (although I think they could possibility if I figure out how to configure it properly).

That aside, Ubuntu offers some games in its software distro channel and one I came across is an old point-and-click adventure called Flight of the Amazon Queen. It’s a decent game, for a retro (if you’re all about graphics, don’t even check it out). I’ve gotten pretty far, but I’m at a point now where I’m rather stuck. I need an ID so I can buy alcohol (I think) and I need “milk from a sacred site” to offer to a witch doctor to make a rash salve for some adventurers in the jungle. I’m at an utter loss as to what to do. However, I’m resisting the temptation to look up the solution. I desperately want to solve the problem myself, for that rewarding factor.

I’m 27, my cousin, 9 years younger, is a guide-book-baby. I’ve never seen him playing a game with a guide-book in hand. For the most part, I’ve never resorted to any guide book besides the users manual. With the exception of some modern mmorpgs, because they don’t come with guide books, necessarily.

Otherwise, this article reminds me of Mario Kart 64. There was a contest to win a golden controller on the Mario track. There’s an exploit where you can use a triple-mushroom to boost over the wall at one point of the track. I used this, but so did apparently enough others. I got a gift certificate, but not the golden controller. Oh, how I wish I had got it. It would sill be inside a glass case, if I did. That experience made me understand the significance of milliseconds.

I had to return to share that I figure out what to do without cheating! It just took some perseverance and thinking outside of the box. No spoilers here (I doubt any of you will ever play the game anyways), but the ID for alcohol was just a distractor. I found something else to give the recipe a little buzz, hehehe.

I remember the same days of googleing pokemon cheats for the gameshark, exploits with missingno, mewtwo, the evee trick, i remember being able to chagne the pokemon to completely different pokemon with the gameshark, 4 line codes could enable the new pokemon rom silver before silver even existed….. it was fun days, then that passion went from gba to ps1, dropping cars from the sky in driver 1, shooting the screen in resident evil 1 in the hallway with all of the windows that had metal shields over them that came down… just cheats have always been in games.

They were put into place for one good reason only. to use when you were stuck to not quit the game, or to maximize your enjoyment after completion of game. so it didnt take hours to upgrade a gun after you spent 50+ hours playing the game allready. alot of games made there be a sequel of sorts in the game, so when you beat the game, you had infinite health or a nice suit. new games today have these things like dead space or just cause 2

2) When you encounter MissingNo, your Pokemon can surpass him in a glitch as the article explains (which I why I put “levels that don’t even exist in game~!”). It’s not a real level, per se, but stats are augmented weirdly and the Pokemon appears to be significantly over 100 for a battle before it sometimes could revert to subzero, level 1, or back to 100. In this case, I remember using the candies on the Blastoise, then encountering MissingNo, and him leveling up to a weird level.

Alright. First of all, I admit that I cheat at games. Many games for many reasons. I’ve modded Doom 3 so that zombies respawn unless you destroy their corpses, and additionally made the weapons more powerful or more accurate. I’ve savegame edited Homeworld and modded ship stats to get some really neat effects in the game.

I’ve even loaded up a number of interesting things in Oblivion like an akatosh dragon and Spartan armour from Halo.

Or even way back when, in Quake 2 with the WoD:LoX mod, playing the single player campaign and taking out enemies with teleport grenades, positron blasts, and guided missiles. Fun stuff.

I cheated my way through the PC version of Halo (after actually getting bored of the flood, epic story my ass), set it to legendary, gave myself infinite grenades and infinite health, and proceeded most of the way through the game using only grenades and pistol whips. Never did make that final jump with the Warthog though.

The point of this is that these things spiced up the games and made for an experience I was looking for. If I level skipped to the end of a game, most likely it was because I no longer desired playing it, or just wanted some closure so I wouldn’t have to play the game anymore. If I noclipped, I was generally lost and needed to get my bearings. Or just to explore all the corners of a map.

Garry’s Mod is another cheating game, the whole thing is a sandbox able to spawn objects and enemies at will. Makes for an interesting run through Half-Life 2. And on top of that its multiplayer. Always wanted to have an intelligent human covering me when I’m taking out the Combine.

But as I said, this all stems from spicing up the game. Its innocent fun, I guess. I’ll still play through things later on and not cheat in any way, if I ever have the desire. As for multiplayer, I’m a good sport. I’ll get spawncamped in TF2 for a few minutes and gradually work my way towards escape. And multiplayer mods are only ever fair if everyone has access to the same sort of abilities.

But lately, specifically with Guild Wars, there’s an entirely different urge to cheat. Time. My time is worth something and I expect some sort of result for investing time. There are missions which require three to four hours of time invested in them. There’s no saves, no checkpoints, just one mission from start to finish with no guarantee of success. Okay, I can handle a challenge. A couple of run throughs and I should be able to get the hang of something and succeed. That is sane sort of thinking. Unfortunately this is an insane world. There are some missions where I have made the attempt 10 to 20 times, investing anywhere from 45 minutes to 4 hours each time, only to have my ass handed to me at the end. I get nothing at all for the amount of time invested. The game itself is no longer fun, and hasn’t been fun for a good while.

I’m not saying that I should just be handed a world without challenge, I just find it difficult to understand how areas of a game that are before or around the halfway point are insanely more difficult than the end bosses. In a normal RPG game this might be understandable, what with stats being increased near the end of the game, but this isn’t the case. I could make an attempt early on in the game and fail after investing several hours, travel to the end of the campaigns with the exact same stats and equipment and then beat each boss in succession, spending maybe 5 to 10 minutes for each one. How does that make sense? Its frustrating enough to make me want to compromise my ethics and cheat in a multiplayer game. I won’t but I seriously want to, just so I never ever have to set foot in those missions again. Those missions actually make me wish I were at work instead, handling a day where nothing goes right at all. At least there’s some sort of progress dealing with 8 hours worth of problems there. Maybe I’ll just get someone to play those specific missions for me while I make a sandwich or something.

On the other hand, there is some truth that cheating can have really bad results. I used a Game Genie (I had like 3 hours left before I needed to return the rental and I really wanted to see the end boss) in MegaMan 2 at one point and was no longer able to progress since I got stuck in a boss room without any special weapon ammo. Had I died, I could have made another attempt. Instead I had to reset the NES and start all over again. Didn’t make it to that point and had to bring back the rental.

Then again, playing as Super Sonic in Sonic the Hedgehog 2 was pretty badass, and accomplished using that one code and then collecting 50 rings. Whats the point in working to the end of the game to get all 8 chaos emeralds to be able to play as Super Sonic for maybe 1 or 2 levels? I’d say playing the game with that extra ability enabled made it a whole lot more fun.

I can relate to your experience with Homeworld and Oblivion. While I’d never explicitly cheat in Oblivion, modding in special weapons and armor simply enriched the experience of the game for me, which I felt was rather bland in the vanilla version. It was always fun to try out new weapons in Quake 2, too, though I stuck to modded servers for those.

It would be nice to actually cheat in Guild Wars, because accumulating those Elite skills can be a real pain in the ass if you don’t have a team to carry you around. Soloing some of those wilderness areas is an absolute pain and I wish I could do without the drudgery. I played the game for a good long time back in 2004 and I’ve tried to go back to it since, but the amount of times it takes just to get a mission right — especially with a pick up group — is bad enough to dissuade me from wanting it to play it anymore. It was fine back in the day when I had a group of people to roll with, but I wouldn’t want to touch it these days.

I think the Angry Video Game Nerd proves a point about when it’s relatively acceptable to cheat. Namely, Ghostbusters on NES. Games like that where it’s almost/basically impossible to beat without it.

There was also one game he needed a cheat code to get past a certain lava pit and there was not one that worked for that. Rather, it had several codes such as “One hit causes instant death” and “Start with less lives” and “No continues”.

“In case you haven’t caught where this is going–yes, you’re reading the words of probably one of the only people in the world who actually beat The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time with only three heart containers and without dying. It was all for the glory, for the supposed immortality it would reward; in reality, this noble quest took almost half a year to master and dozens of replays.”

really ? dozens? OoT was easy 000, 3 hearts. me and a friend used to do it all the time. combat in that game was rather easy and later on you could abuse that spell to make you invincible, though it was hardly necessary. majoras mask was much tougher

Here I was hoping you would actually get a pop-culture reference and realize that “clever use of game mechanics” is a phrase often said when cheaters are caught. I wasn’t wall-hacking, it was just a clever use of game mechanics, man!

what? beating OOT with 3 hearts without dying is a pretty easy feat as far as gaming goes; that game is ridiculously easy. I beat it with 4 hearts without dying once on only my second playthrough of the game, some 10 years after i had played through the original time. It’s actually one of my biggest problems with the game; it’s just way too easy to beat with little or no challenge.

i use to play wow, i was never too serious about it, i think at the end of it all i was like lvl 30 ish back when 60 was the cap. well i decided to see how i could cheat wow. i didn’t want to interfear with other player’s gameplay, so i kept that in mind. i would jump around every inch of map trying to find an area you cant normally get to (and there are a ton besides the normally documented ones..) and i would speedhack just to see. All of that stuff didnt get me banned though (and in the end i only ended up with a 10 day ban but closed my account) what got me banned was i figured out a way to take an item in inventory
put it in the mailbox thing or bank or whatever, look up the item code of another item (something rare) then i would have WPE sniff out that packet sent from the server when you take said item out, and replace it with a rare item instead. This originally was not something wow even checked for, but now they have systems in place for it.

single player games i will cheat in to get me past a certian area if need be. like hl2:ep2..the strider’s near the end..all..those..damn…striders…